Mardi 6 octobre à 18h en salle 126 de Saint-Charles 1
Scalar ironies in contemporary ecofiction
This paper investigates the epistemic and ethical potential of scalar irony in ecological literary practice. Drawing from contemporary works of fiction by Ali Smith, Margaret Atwood, Samantha Harvey and Richard Flanagan, I define scalar irony as a form of situational irony that arises from perception operating simultaneously at several different scales. Through such discrepancies, environmental aesthetics register the discordance between daily human experience and an environmental crisis unfolding at scales that are more difficult to perceive. Following Haraway, I approach irony as a mode of thought capable of “holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true”. I ask to what extent scalar irony might thus provide an alternative both to ecological didacticism and to ecological cynicism, offering a third way that helps the reader to carry the cognitive and emotional contradictions of ecological awareness. As a literary strategy, scalar irony not only suggests there is no single “right” scale at which to view a situation, it may also offer a way forward through the cognitive dissonances of the Anthropocene.
Dr Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her research examines the role of biology in contemporary literature and performance. She directs the BioCriticism webinar and codirects the climate action networking project SCAIRY. Her most recent books are Entangled Life in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Multi-Scalar Poetics (open access, Cambridge University Press, 2026) and the collective volumes Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance (co-edited with Pierre-Louis Patoine, Open Book Publishers, 2022) and Microscopic Life in Early Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance (co-edited with with Sarah Bouttier, François-Joseph Lapointe and Sarah Montin, Open Book Publishers, forthcoming).